The U.S. Department of Education building is seen in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Jose Luis Magana / AP
President Trump is reportedly preparing to shrink or potentially dismantle the Department of Education through executive action.
Abolishing the Department of Education was part of Project 2025, the blueprint for a Trump presidency from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Dozens of department workers have already been placed on administrative leave, according to NPR’s reporting. Getting rid of the department entirely would require an act of Congress.
“These roots of what is today the Department of Education help us understand what the department is really good for,” says Jack Schneider, who leads the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
3 questions with Jack Schneider
The Department of Education was created in 1979, but its origins date back much farther. Take us back to post-Civil War, when there was an attempt to enact it.
“I think that these roots of what is today the Department of Education help us understand what the department is really good for. It was created after the Civil War as a part of reconstruction. And its main function was to try to ensure civil rights, and that’s always been a part of the Department of Education’s function.
“It wasn’t always a cabinet-level department, so that was what [former President] Jimmy Carter signed into law, but prior to that, it was the Office of Education. It later became the Bureau of Education. Later it was subsumed by Health Education and Welfare. And then it was after that that a congressional act that Carter signed into law broke the Department of Education off from Health Education and Welfare and created the U.S. Department of Education and then what we know now as the Department of Health and Human Services.”
What did people in the South think of the department’s creation?
“There has long been a tension between those who want to use the federal government as a mechanism for enforcing civil rights and those who don’t. There’s another tension that is concurrent here, and that’s the tension between local control in education and perceptions of federal overreach.
“We have a history of local control in that our public education system really arises out of local schooling. So today there are 13,000 school districts, which maintain really robust kinds of powers around things like hiring and firing teachers or adopting curriculum. Constitutionally, states have the power in education because anything not explicitly named as a power of the federal government is therefore given to the states, and we’ve got 50 different state systems of education, and states have very real powers over things like teacher licensure, textbook adoption, funding formulas.”
One of the things the department now does is disperse funds to schools that serve low-income students, required by law. So, let’s say the Department of Education goes away on a federal level. What happens to that?
“The main way that the Department of Education supports students from low-income families is through what’s called Title I funding. This is a part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that came out of the [former President Lyndon] Johnson administration. Now that was an act of Congress. You can’t get rid of that. So if you get rid of the Department of Education, what you need to do is find a new place for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to live, and that’s going to be administratively challenging because we’re talking about $15 billion annually.
“And that isn’t the only program that was created by an act of Congress that wouldn’t go away even if Donald Trump was able to convince Congress to get rid of the Department of Education. So we have, for instance, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which disperses about $15 billion a year for students with disabilities. We have the Higher Education Act of 1965. Through that we get about $30 billion a year in Pell grants for college students as well as roughly $25 billion a year in loans. And then there’s the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title VI of that prohibits racial discrimination if federal funds are involved and right now the Department of Education is in charge of overseeing that in terms of schools.”
As with many things that the new president is trying to do, can he just abolish the Department of Education or does Congress have to do that?
“He can’t get rid of it with an executive order. What he can do is he can try to really kneecap the department. He can render it really ineffective. He can create chaos. He can use the bully pulpit to try to rally support among the American people for abolishing the department. Getting rid of it entirely will take an act of Congress, and right now, I don’t think that he’s got the votes.
“It is worth taking a quick trip into the time machine back to the creation of the department, when there were 14 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate and 12 co-sponsors in the House. So, this was not originally a partisan sop to the teachers’ unions as it is sometimes portrayed as. It was the elevation of education to a level of national concern. And so, the original legislation that Congress passed and that Jimmy Carter signed into law stated that the first and most important purpose of this new cabinet-level department was to strengthen the federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual. That wasn’t particularly controversial 45 years ago, and I don’t think it’s particularly controversial today.”
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Gabrielle Healy produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.